How would a realistic space battle look like?

How would a realistic space battle look like?

Would it be boring for players?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle
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A realistic setting almost certianly has no FTL and therefore the odds of a space battle happening to begin with are almost nil.

ha ha ha ha ha ha

Most would probably take place in orbit.

It's easy to assume "realistic" space battles would work kind of like submarine warfare with ships millions of kilometers away from each other firing torpedos. A missile swinging wide of your ship by ten thousand km is an insanely close call.

Thing is this is a grossly inefficient way of waging a war. A missile or torpedo going that far a distance is going to be massively expensive, and it's almost a guaranteed miss anyway because at four million kilometers away that target has plenty of time to react.

Actual space battles would probably happen in orbit with ships and stations firing mass driver slugs and guided missiles at each other. Now it's only a few hundred kilometers instead of a few million. This also makes low orbit a strategically critical area because if you secure it you now have a staging ground for sending down troops, supplies, or just outright killing the planet if you feel like it.

Very long range weapons (modern dogfights happen at a range of miles so for ships hundreds, maybe thousands of miles?)

no sound, explosions, etc.

I would think of it as similar to submarine battles. You don't really know exactly what the other sub is doing, your torpedoes take 10 minutes or more to reach their target, and you don't know what damage they did on impact unless they are obviously disabled or attempt to flee.

probably pretty boring.

Distances would probably be extreme enough that it wouldn't even look like anything. You'd be looking at blips in your holofeed and running algorithms to fire at where the enemy might be in a split second after the shot fires.

the actual distance between enemy ships would probably be several kilometres.

Fundamentally, we don't know. As a species we've hardly moved past our planet's atmosphere, nor have we detected any evidence of other species moving about (in any recognisable way).

For us to try and predict what form a future space-conflict would take, is like a Pacific-islander tribe who only have canoes trying to invent from scratch the details of the Battle of Jutland, or the u-boat conflicts of WW2. Or modern carrier-group logistics. We simply have no hope of being accurate.

What we CAN do, is say "what would things look like, presuming X is true?" where X is a quantity you have no real evidence for one way or the other. Such as FTL travel being either possible or impossible. Or a new form of easy fusion power being developed. This type of theorising is commonly known as "science fiction".

> Railguns and particle beams engage as directed by computers as soon as they detect the enemy ships on radar.
> Enemy ships are preceded into orbit by a cloud of relativistic munitions and coherent light beams.
> Common, easily calculated orbits are full of debris and covered by weapon platforms, invaders have to enter into oblique orbits and adjust carefully
> Turning on the drive at all attracts beam spam to your vector

The problem with space is the distance and there is no where to hide. You can't hide because the other ship can simply see your heat signature. In order to hide you would need heat sinks that you then cast off from the ship itself.

Now assuming you can hide and you spot another ship. Chances are they are thousands of kilometers away so firing missiles is useless as they will have time to intercept them.ass drivers seem to be the answer but even with them if the target makes a minor adjustment the shot will miss.

It's like throwing a dart at moving dartboard from across an oval.

There would also be no manned fighter craft but just drones. Drones could take the sudden change in direction whereas a human would die. Even in space there is inertia.

That is a problem these days as well for fighter pilots. It's pretty damn hard pulling a 9 G turn.

So chances are battles will be fought at massive distances with either drones or mass drivers and missiles. Who ever can surprise attack or has more supplies wins.

Downbellow station has a pretty neat 'realistic' space battle. its all based on predicted vectors and mass drivers/railguns over long distances,

While the range of a space-based weapon can be enormous, accurate targeting is much harder. You're likely to get a distance of a few hundred to few thousand kilometers, not fighting from opposite sides of a solar system.

There is no such thing as stealth, at least for a ship. Engines are too bright, you can't accelerate without giving yourself away. And if you do one burn and then drift, your opponents can calculate where you are from your last known position and velocity.

Only missiles, with their bright engines, can be seen coming. Any other weapon is effectively invisible in space, at least to the naked eye. Sensors could spot them, and indeed you want that to be able to evade or shoot down incoming attacks. Looking out the window would make space combat look absolutely boring, which is good because windows are a structural weakness so you don't want them anyway.

childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/

Yeah, that would likely be boring for your average player.
Until their ship got hit. Things'd change pretty fast then.

Oh look it's this thread again

Time to get the popcorn, Veeky Forums's about to go full retard

>several kilometers
>a lot
what

>In order to hide you would need heat sinks that you then cast off from the ship itself.
They'd have to be hella good heat sinks to keep your heat below 3 Kelvin and even then the enemy ship will detect all the heat sinks you're throwing off into the void, so again you can't hide

I think the point he's making is the sheer vastness of space means warfare is only efficient at close distances.

Oh shit, it finally came out. I saw this on Ad Astra and Project Rho.

in mid-space there would be no up or down of course. you always see pictures with all the spaceships facing the same way 'up'. In reality, spaceships would probably not even have an upside, which would make battlescenes more complex and confusing to describe and to deal with. There is no point of orientation in the void of intergalactic space. It is pretty interesting to think about.

Also, since you don't have to make ships have an upside or be aerodynamic you can go as crazy as you want with the shape of your ship.

Also no sound, which adds to the disorientation maybe.

Also the massive distances are a thing. Probably the only things fast enough to hit in a reasonably short time would be laserbeams.

Or, if we go really crazy, ships tearing each other apart using some sort of grav-beams.

These battles will probably take very long though as because of the distance the interaction speed is low.

Humans are pissing about with tiny "realistic" tin-cans of a spacefleet, trying to expand and resource grab, different factions shitting all over each other. Then a massive alien cruiser turns up, the kind of thing that can only be manufactured when you have factories the size of from entire moons, and just wrecks everything.

Remember kids, in war frugality and efficiency is a sign of poverty. An AK-47 is very frugal, but an A10 will wreck your shit.

As mentioned upthread, Children of a Dead Earth is probably what nearish-future space combat will be like.
Everything that isn't a missile barrage is at knife-fight (though still beyond visual) ranges.

Magnetic weapons tend to be spray and pray, with high damage counteracted by low-accuracy due to lag(?)

Due to diffraction, lasers are only useful for pinpoint component disabling.
Though apparently CoaDE's lasers are underpowered, idk.

In terms of RPGs, space battles in general tend to be a bit dull for players, unless you go full Star Trek and have the players as departmental officers commanding a large vessel. See Stars Without Number's Skyward Steel supplement, which is pretty neat.

For a small Free Trader Beowulf, there aren't a lot of roles beyond Pilot, a Gunner per turret, and maybe an engineer to watch the drive and do any repairs. I guess a sensor operator as well, but that's essentially just painting targets for the gunners.

The Expanse is a good example of what a "realistic" space battle might be like.

That looks like a modern naval battle just with everything blue and sci-fi

That is precisely the opposite lesson you should learn from that example.

I prefer bodacious space pirates.

I love Mouretsu Pirates's magic ECM because it makes space battles fun again.

???

Ships launching drones that move very quickly and toss torpedos armed with nuclear penetrator warheads against ships that are doing the same. Also point-defense systems to prevent that.

I imagine you'd have slower kinetic weapons can be shot down or dodged (but pretty much 1HKO they manage to hit), and radiation beams that are pretty much undodgeable, but deal slower damage by gradually burning away at the surface of the enemy ship.

Incredibly expensive to the point where no one wants to fight. Probably start off with some rogue private frigates and boarding parties. Slowly working it's way up to longer and linger engagements. Pick a spot in between the boarding parties and the 4 planets worth of space between ships for maximum fun.

>and it's almost a guaranteed miss anyway because at four million kilometers away that target has plenty of time to react.

Because as we all know missiles and torpedoes are unable to alter their course after launch.

Even if your heat sinks do the job, the moment you turn on your engine you have a huge flare shooting out of your ass telling everyone your position, velocity, and acceleration.

Then you shut it down and Newton's second kicks in, so even if no one can see you it'd be trivial to calculate where you are at any given time based on your last known position and velocity.

>Because as we all know missiles and torpedoes are unable to alter their course after launch.

And the objects they're chasing can do so as well, especially when we're talking about the distances you find in space.

If these ships are hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, then it could easily take days for those missiles to reach their target.

There will likely never be space battles in the way anyone in this thread is picturing them.

Even the ones involving missiles and things at extreme long ranges probably wont happen, because technological development by that point will render that sort of thing extremely primitive.

>mfw you guys dont know what a relativistic projectile is
>mfw they can literarily see the universe as near flat and see your ship that is 10 lightyears away as if it was only a meter away and therefore can strike with pinpoint accuracy even with slowed time using quantum mechanical computers to make decisions in planck time
>mfw this is is the best possible scenario

There will never be anything other than that with the only "combat" being hiding yourself well enough to avoid solar system size shotgun-blasts coming from random directions.

The tread was about realistic space battles, not warm butter sci-fi.

It gets even more frightening than that.

At the level of tech where we have quantum computers calculating the firing solutions we can also be accelerating subatomic particles at relativistic speeds (or maybe even greater depending on how much quantum fuckery is involved) and then have them degrade into massive gamma radiation blooms from inside the targets armor after passing through anything in its path like it never even existed. Even if you had the same weapons it might be impossible to even intercept them. If you can be seen, you're dead, and considering we have no theoretical path to developing stealth in space....

Based on what tech level?

>they
Who?

>see your ship that is 10 lightyears
Then it'll be 10 years out of date.

Everything you've written is for Culture or Xeelee-level Clarke's Third Law bullshit

That's the post closest to discussing realism.

The ones discussing stupid shit like "torpedoes" as if space battles would have any resemblance to naval warfare are the ones ascribing to soft sci-fi.

Read up on current developments in particle physics and quantum mechanics. We're closer to doing these things than to figuring out FTL travel. Quantum computers might even already exist today in a top secret capacity.

I know you are joking, but for the ones who lack any physics education my description is 100% scientifically accurate.
If anyone can tell me whats wrong or a more effective weapon utilizing proven physics go ahead.

>who
Anyone

>10 years out of date
Ah you didnt even read my post?

Man i cant wait for the autists to avoid explaining why the science is wrong.

What. Quantum computers already exists ya doof. They are just horribly unwieldy right now.

Not him but the actual path technological development will take in reality is likely going to be very different from your perception of it based on what sci-fi has told you.

Case in point, 50 years ago everyone thought we would have flying cars by now. We don't, but we do have the internet and smart phones, something nobody back then even really conceived of.

When we are well into the space age, we may still have no conventional way of doing FTL travel for human beings - but there is reason to believe we may have quantum weapons that can destroy anything at any range we can detect in a split second.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

>Mfw anons boring idea apparently is legit

>relativistic projectile
>closest to realisim

lel
Torpedoes are far more realistic.
The energy requirements for getting projectiles to travel at relativistic speeds would be so monstrous as to make them completely unworkable.
One could actually build a space torpedo, even if it didn't work well.

>humans defying gravity
>closest to realism

lel
Mechanical cavalry charges are far more realistic.
The energy requirements for getting a person to fly would be so monstrous as to make them completely unworkable.
One could actually build a steam-powered horse, even if it didn't work well.

>Anons race builds conventional torpedos and trek hundreds of ships at ultra slow speed for thousands of years toward alien base
>Alien race builds small kinetic impactors that are so small they accelerate to almost light speed, human ships are destroyed because autist thinks scifi trumps physics and cold tactics

Sometimes i forget there are alot of young uneducated people on here.

Explain to me how quantum computers can tell where a ship is at the current time while it is 10 light years away. If nothing else, it'll be educational then.

This is a thread for realism, not your bullshit scifi.

Torpedoes are doable, we know this. Your magic light speed accelerators may as well be wishes and pixie dust in the context of this thread.

*Tips fedora*

It would basically be as shit as submarine warfare, cranked to eleven.
Since there is no cover, no hiding or whatever, whoever detect the other first without his shot being detected win.
Weaponry would probably be nukes, as the battlefield is gigantic, empty, and the target can move a lot.

>Anons race builds shit that works
>Alien race bankrupt themselves after attempting to generate the energy required to accelerate projectiles to near light speed.

This is the most retarded self-defeating argument I've ever seen.

You're asserting that space battles will take place, for which the prerequisite is humans have access to FTL travel, and yet you believe the energy requirements for weapons accelerating projectiles that are significantly smaller by vast orders of magnitude to a mere fraction of the speed of light, let alone the kind of magnitudes of multiple speeds of light you'd need to get around between systems at any workable rate within human lifespans, is somehow unviable?

What kind of fucking retard do you have to be to think that makes any sense?

Please continue to argue why space battles would look like the way you want it to look because muh sci-fi and not like how the experts who have spent decades studying particle physics, quantum mechanics and astronomy speculate it will be.

Moving at relativistic speeds make the universe "flatter" from the view of the projectile, at the cost of its internal clock running slower.

If given a quantum computer it could easily readjust course to follow you even with a slowed clock.

Deploy a couple of million of these all accelerating in direction around the ship and course correct.

>Guys this is a realism thread so talking about projectiles using newtons laws of motion aka newtons laws of scifi mumbo jumbo is just silly
>Remember only use things proven to work, like leeches and bloodletting for bubonic plague

You have to make your trolling less obvious.

>Anons race build some slow ships to shoot abit in orbit in 200 years when they arrive
>alien race sends kinetic projectiles the size of cities accelerating using smaller nukes(its a thing) to near relativistic speeds so they cant be interecepted
>Anons ships come and do indeed shoot m,aybe 100 enemy ships each
>But earth and all other planets are now gone

Sounds good user! Reaaaaally scary to share a jobmarket with a guy as bright as you.

>You're asserting that space battles will take place,

Nope. I'm just pointing out that this thread is aiming for realism, not wild make believe.

>for which the prerequisite is humans have access to FTL travel,

How is that a prerequisite at all? FTl travel is not necessary to have two ships shooting at each other in space.

Absolutely use technologies that work, with only minor extrapolation.

So you are saying current quantum computers will not improve and that nuke-drives also will break all known physics when tested?

Won't course-correction at those velocities be very energy intensive? Unless you're course correcting far from the target, but then you've got the problem of light-lag again.

Thats why you send millions of them.

If the thread said space battles around earth it would be a different story

You are fucking retarded. Quantum computers are a huge meme.

>How is that a prerequisite at all?

I think that user is going by "If FTL-magic exists, then why not acceleration-magic"

Though it leaves out Expanse-style FTL-less sci-fi

What are you attempting to say here?
You've completely changed the scenario.
Now it's not about ships but people throwing big rocks.
Now we're nowhere near light speed.

How would you accelerate that projectile up to relativistic speeds? Where would you keep all the reaction mass?

I'm saying you shouldn't make wild assumptions.

>I think that user is going by "If FTL-magic exists, then why not acceleration-magic"

Yes, but FTL was never specified by OP.
Realistically there is no FTL travel so it should be discounted.

>How would a realistic space battle look like?
Interplanetary nuclear rockets and EMPs are fired at anything lacking the capabilities to intercept or destroy them. Space battles are slow wars of attrition between whole planets instead of individual fleets.

user they are literally in development. Look stuff up before you make yourself look like a retard.

I freely admit to shifting the goalposts, but there comes a point (probably an actual point on the Kardashev scale) where you stop having space battles and just start throwing unavoidable relativistic rocks at each other in a MAD-scenario.

I feel that at that point "space battles" aren't really a thing.
Maybe it'd be more constructive to argue about what sort of space warfare would go on before civilisations reach that point? At least in an RPG-application sense

>have one at my uni
>Easily measured that it works faster on certain problems
>Guy to stupid to understand it calls it a meme out of frustration

Ah yeah another one of these threads.

Dodging explaining why im wrong again, see below.
Its fine that you dont keep up with modern science but please be upfront with it and dont get mad when you dont understand things, its childish.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
If only i had mentioned it several times it would have been easier huh?
Why are you stalling?

But nah you are right guys, those nasa "scientists" dont know shit compared to you!
Same with all those fancy pants "scientists" who built em fancy quantum computers, i cant understand them so they are obviously a sham!
Those nasa people even believe the earth is round i mean how stupid could someone be?

That's a completely self-defeating method of warfare. You are wasting resources, time and energy sending packets of mass over to your opponents planet where he can intercept them at leisure and then cannibalize them for materials.

Rule adjustment: How would space warfare work between humans only, no aliums
Hard mode: A MAD-like atmosphere preventing you from say, blowing up entire planets/moons/asteroid bases/whatever on a whim (also applicable if it's a resource war, you want that stuff intact)

Aaaand I should do more reading because that's basically the same as

>Dodging explaining why im wrong again

Nope, you've just yet to explain how you're going to accelerate projectiles to near light speed. And no, Nuclear pulse projection gets you nowhere close.
It might make for a better space torpedo though.

>Intercepting a relativistic projectile

Man you guys actually never read about relativity huh?

Actually kinda spooked how many here never seem to have read anything relating to the sciences at all.

This guy gets it.

Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

>Intercepting a relativistic projectile
I don't think the user that that user was replying to was talking about relativistic projectiles.

>Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

Also, not that user, but assuming you are using an Orion-drive-esque-thing, what's the ballpark mass of bombs you'd need to get to a sizeable portion of C?
Speaking of which, what fraction of C would be best for a relativistic projectile?

>Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

I doubt they were writing about shooting small projectiles at near light speed for use in space battles.

As high as possible, getting it to just 50% would still be almost impossible to intercept without sensors scattered around at huuuuuuuuge distances. Youd need alooooot, but just accelerating 4 kilos would for example burn the earths atmosphere at that speed.

Nope they are writing about accelerating other things to not even half a percent of the speed of life, but being scientists they realise the concept at math goes beyond that, and accelerating i.e a spaceshi using a method means it can, in the majority of cases be used to accelerate other things which they mention in the papers.

But man your argument is again so smart im in awe: how stupid am i for thinking that just because a horse can pull a wagon with 2 wheels that that means it should be able pull one with 4? The leap from accelerating soft squishhumans and assuming a dead solid projectil would also work is retarded.

Hold your enemy's star hostage by threatening to broadcast its location into the Dark Forest. Talk them down to peace by threatening total destruction.

Intercepting an RKV would be a hybrid of today's ballistic missile interceptors and the principle behind reactive armor. It would ultimately come down to being able to detect its approach in time to launch your interceptors and then a battle of course-correction algorithms between each interceptor and the RKV. You'd launch a wave of interceptors since the whole thing is a game of probability.

But user physics is too scifi for this thread. Keep it at "Lets call em torpedos because it sounds cool"

>Nope they are writing about accelerating other things to not even half a percent of the speed of life, but being scientists they realise the concept at math goes beyond that, and accelerating i.e a spaceshi using a method means it can, in the majority of cases be used to accelerate other things which they mention in the papers.

What's your point? I've never said it's mathematically impossible for things to accelerate to a significant percentage of light speed. But that requires a lot of energy and we're talking about realism here.
It's not at all realistic that a spaceship would be able to produce the energy required to fire off a projectile at near light speed.

Why in the world would you carry them on a ship?

Wouldn't even a successful interception turn the oncoming projectiles into near-C debris? If those projectiles are coming at your home, then it seems like your [insert celestial object here] would still be pretty fucked anyway

Because this thread is talking about space battles.

Play a game called Aurora. I feel like that's one of the more realistic depictions of 'space combat' I have seen in recent years.

Sorry my bad, forgot space only can contain ships while they earth and other planets in fact are not in any way in space.

Man i really am stupid, forgetting that planets, stars etc in fact dont exist in space.

Stop being such a pedant.

>Wanting realistic space battles

You're a massive fucking pleb.

Aurora 4x is incredibly unrealistic. It treats spacetime as a fluid. That places it firmly in fiction territory. It's just boats in space. In fact it's even more restrictive than that because when you run out of fuel you stop in place, whereas boats could be carried along a tide. It's a fun game but don't mistake it for realism.

>How would a realistic space battle look like?

By "realistic" you mean "speculation based on existing science that may or may not be replaced by another cutting edge inovation"? Then it mostly consist of boarding actions on strategic space stations and colonies with bunch of Astromarines with space exos and shuttle transport instead of dreaming about fliying tubes with bunch of missiles and guns slapped in while ignoring any existance of cyber warfare and other method of countermeasure. Because it'll be extremely expensive without any meaningfull gain whatsoever, while creating bunch of unnecessary ruckus and much of kessler syndromes that'll end up with much of strategical loss.

The only time where spaceship battles were viable is when we're already throw most of our space manufacturing capabilities into space and when we're already master the way of interstellar travel. But by that time, our understanding on technologies, science, and culture will greatly differs from ours, so much that the matter of shapes aren't really much of problems to us.

tl,dr: we cannot predict on how spaceship battles in the future would actually work.

Properly deployed lasers actually dominate chode battlespaces, even with their laughable efficiency of a few percent and the tiny hardcoded engagement ranges of the game.

Alternatively, weapons would be more like railguns or possibly light or particle-based projectiles. So instead of waiting for stealthed torpedoes to reach their targets and swing by wide margins (assuming they themselves don't have guidance systems to take them to the target), it'd be a tense situation of just waiting for a firing solution on a hard target and then obliterating it in a fraction of a second, hoping you didn't just hit a decoy and gave away your position, in which case you'd probably be the ones being vaporized by a railgun shot in the next few seconds.

>getting close enough that an enemy could blast you in a fraction of a second
If that happened then people would stay far out of that range of each other so that they have time to maneuver away from incoming shots

...

>How is that a prerequisite at all? FTl travel is not necessary to have two ships shooting at each other in space.
Without access to transportation energy/ efficiency that would allow for FTL, civilian infrastructure is probably never going beyond orbit. Which means there's not going to be anything in space worth fighting for further away from the moon. So there's basically never going to be big space battles, because nothing will be as expensive in the ship.

realistic space battles would involve little blips firing at eachother from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. No noise, little action, just intense ship sniper skirmishes.

That's like saying that "without infinite energy, we'll never sail to America"

The Expanse space battles are relatively unique in TV sci-fi (with ships being fragile as fuck and PDCs easily slaughtering the crew) but it ain't realistic. No ships use radiators, laser weapons don't exist, every battle has the ships be close enough to be in-camera, ships preferring to use turrets and guns instead of the asteroid-busting nukes they have, etc. It's neat that it's relatively harder than most series, but it ain't absolute realism by any measure.

Realistic space battles between two starcraft using current tech projections would occur at extreme distances (probably in light seconds) and would use DEWs. Orbital conflicts could use things like KE or missiles but the distances in interplanetary space are too large for that to be reliable without saturation fire into projected enemy vectors.

The user talking about RKVs however, while useful on a planetary target, would require some form of super material to withstand the absurd stress from delta v at relativistic velocities not to mention an impressive internal propulsion system in order to course correct to hit a starcraft that may be actively manouvering. A pretty significant investment that may not even be feasible with material science.

Underrated post.

Why is Veeky Forums full of such utterly unbearable faggots? Has it got something to do with all the communists?

Interplanetary travel with concepts like the EM drive may indeed make it cost effective after easily accessed resources are all exploited within Earth's orbit. A month transit time to Mars for iron would be economical when it's the nearest resource you have.

Eggshells fighting with sniper rifles in an open area where stealth is literally impossible and your own body will cook you alive if you're not careful.